Geography and gender: Feminism and a feeling of justice

Abstract

The recent emphasis on emotional geographies has turned critical attention to the connections linking affect and social justice. It is hard to imagine this ‘emotional turn’ in the field without much of the ground having been laid by feminist challenges to epistemology, objectivity, rationality, to the gendering of knowledge and the conceptualization of human embodiment, psychic life, subjectivity, and political agency, all in relation to power so often substantiated around a belief that the public and the private are discrete and oppositional domains necessary for organizing social, economic, and political life. In this report, I address the following questions. How can feminist and emotional geography tighten their connections, fuel their shared passions and generate a synergy of scholarship oriented toward activism and progressive change? How can geographies of feeling broaden the path for justice that feminism endeavors to plow? In doing so, I continue my emphasis on research that grounds theoretical discussion with research conducted in activist projects conducted in the name of social justice. I do so as a matter of my own emotional investments — I firmly believe that scholarship must engage with the ways in which people beyond the academy wrestle with the concepts in their daily lives that scholars contemplate, sharpen, and circulate through academic production. So the debates that we scholars so often have with ourselves over the finer points of theory reveal, in my view, their greater significance when they provide tools useful for people who seek to create kinder and more compassionate worlds. Thus, I highlight the scholarship that creates toolkits out of feminist scholarship, emotional geographies, and research on social justice.

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